Summer Reading Recommendations
June 2026
Summer is the season of soft serve (mountains of it), peaches and tomatoes, lounge chairs and short-shorts—and, of course, books propped open in the grass, beside the pool, and on the sand.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been inching through The Swann Way, the first book of Marcel Proust’s mammoth seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. Sure, this lush and languid and utterly plotless novel might seem like the opposite of a beach read, but I contend that hot and humid summer afternoons are the ideal backdrop to Proust’s ruminations on memory and childhood. The June days are long enough to linger with Proust’s windy sentences and the images he conjures of everyday life in the fictional French town of Combray.
Searching for summer reading of your own? Below, you’ll find recommendations from the writers in our June issue, plus a few favorites from our staff. Lather on that sunscreen, lay out your towel, and enjoy.
—Al Favilla, Editorial Assistant
The Anthropologists
I was enthralled by Ayşegül Savaş’s 2025 novel The Anthropologists. It’s a simple story, in a way, about Asya, a documentary filmmaker, and her husband, Manu, who works for a nonprofit. We never learn their nationality or the name of the city to which they’ve moved, and nothing dramatic happens. And yet, spending time with this young couple as they go about their (mostly) ordinary days is delightful. I’ve recommended this book to several people, including a friend typically drawn to more plot-driven stories. All of them loved it as much as I did.
—Jane Bernstein
Read Jane’s essay “Formed Otherwise”
Case Histories
Kate Atkinson is one of my favorite authors, and, to me, a mystery by a great writer is an ideal summer beach read. Case Histories interweaves the stories of two murders and the disappearance of a child who was camping in her backyard. It’s extremely satisfying to watch the author tie the novel’s many threads together, using her wit and humor to offset the grimmer aspects of the plot. I read it in one sitting—a rare feat for me!
—Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor
Heart the Lover
I love a love story that rises and falls as the characters find their way (often getting in their own way, as they do). It takes a lot for me to get swept up in a novel, but Heart the Lover, by Lily King, had me pulled in from start to finish.
— Shuly Xóchitl
Read Shuly’s poem “Because I became allergic to chocolate when I was seventeen”
How to Catch a Mole
Marc Hamer's How to Catch a Mole is a memoir in both prose and poetry about his career as a professional molecatcher in the Welsh countryside. (It’s amazing to me that such a job exists!) I found it beautifully tender and meditative.
—Rob Bowers, Editor and Publisher
Joyful, Anyway
In her latest book, Joyful, Anyway, Kate Bowler takes on all the hard questions: Why are we humans perpetually unsatisfied? How can we find joy, even in suffering? Bowler braids together personal stories with philosophical insights to arrive at some hard-earned answers. And she’s a great storyteller. I laughed out loud. This book is a bestseller for a reason.
—Heather Lanier
Read Heather’s essay “The Good End of Pleasant Street”
The Land in Winter
My summer-reading recommendation is, ironically, The Land in Winter, by Andrew Miller. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the novel traces a month in the lives of two married couples who live across a field from each other in rural England during the Big Freeze of 1963—one of the worst UK winters on record. The heavy snow and extreme cold disrupt their quiet existence and threaten to expose the secrets they've each been keeping about their past and present. An intimate portrait of midcentury, middle-class British life, the book is by turns funny and tragic and a great escape from the summer heat.
—Andrew Snee, Managing Editor
The Last Town
My snootier self wants to throw down Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Byung-Chul Han’s The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering, and Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. These are books I’ve purchased recently—rather than borrowed from our amazing local library—because I know I’ll love them, or I want to love them, or I love the idea of them. But they’re all still on the shelf, bookmarks stuck in the first chapter. Meanwhile, I’m deeply engrossed in the third book of Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines trilogy, which a nurse I work with lent me just a few days ago. The series reads like a super-prescient sci-fi-dystopian-thriller-horror movie—the perfect summer beach read! Apparently it’s also a TV show, but why bother with that when there are so many other Blake Crouch books to read?
—Craig Reinbold
Read Craig’s essay “Our Fraying Hearts”
My Broken Language
My favorite book so far this year is Quiara Alegría Hudes’s My Broken Language, a memoir of how the author became a playwright. Hudes wrote the book for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway show In the Heights and won a Pulitzer Prize for her play Water by the Spoonful. In her memoir, she talks about growing up in a close-knit Puerto Rican family in Philadelphia, her mother’s spiritual practice of Santeria, and her relationship to music (she was a music major at Yale), among other things. And the language is gorgeous!
—Alison Luterman
Read Alison’s poem “City Chickens”
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